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Sid Meier on Civilization Revolution

We talk with the genius of PC strategy gaming about his embrace of the console market and how Gran Turismo led straight to Civilization Revolution.

The smile is still there. The big, ever-ready grin that's known to fans of the original PC Civilization splits Sid Meier's face as I enter a suite in the Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica. Sid's come to the 2007 E3 to tell the world about Civilization Revolution, the very first Civilization experience designed specifically for console. I've come to pick Sid's brain and find out why a man synonymous with the hardcore PC strategy titles is at last embracing the world of the console.

"I've been a PC gamer for a long time," Sid says in response to a query about his move to console. "Then my son (who's a console gamer) opened my eyes to what console games had become. They're not what I imagined them to be." Sid credits the game Gran Turismo III for really educating him about what console games could achieve. The Gran Turismo series presents the player with an extraordinary depth of play in a genre traditionally not usually conducive to very deep experiences.

"Console gamers enjoy being entertained, they enjoy the spectacle, but they don't enjoy it to the detriment of good gameplay," Meier said. "Gran Turismo has great depth and intelligence to it along with an incredible visual presentation." According to Meier, this set him on an exploration of the console world and made him think about his own Civilization franchise. "We have an exciting story to tell -- the history of the world -- and we can present this story in such a way that it fits into the expectations of console gamers."

Liberation

"It's kind of liberating to start over again with a whole new generation of gamers," Meier said. When he had made the decision to try and bring the Civilization experience to consoles he knew he couldn't just do a direct port of Civilization IV to the Xbox 360. Even discounting the practical difficulties of moving a mouse- and keyboard-driven game to one run by controller, doing so wouldn't be respecting either audience, the PC gamers who had supported the franchise for many years or the console gamers he hoped to attract. Instead he needed to go back to the beginning, retreating in his mind 15 years to the initial conception for Civilization.

"What's the heart of the Civilization experience?" Meier asks rhetorically, then answers himself. Things like diplomacy and negotiation with enemy leaders, shepherding a tribe of people through thousands of years of history, enjoying the feeling of progression as a player's civ acquired new technology, the feeling of triumph when armies were victorious in battle and having multiple ways to achieve a victory... With that he started stripping away anything that could interrupt the smooth-flowing fast-moving feeling he was looking for and in the process discovered some interesting things about his own creations. "I can't believe we had zones of control in (the first) Civilization," he said. As the design of Civilization Revolution started to evolve, he stuck strictly to the philosophy that anything that slowed the pace of the game down had to go. Players still build cities, add buildings and Wonders and move armies around the map but they won't be required to manage enormous tracts of the globe and micromanage 25-30 widely separated cities and hundreds of military units.